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DVARA headers — request and response reference

DVARA is an AI governance platform, so every /v1/* request is already audited with a server-generated trace ID. The headers below let you authenticate, correlate the audit trail with your own request identifiers, and read the signals DVARA emits back on the response.

Request headers​

Authorization: Bearer gw_…​

Required on every data-plane request. The API key is minted in the DVARA Flightdeck (/portal/keys for tenants, /tenants/{id}/keys for operators) and starts with gw_. The full secret is shown exactly once at creation time — only a SHA-256 hash is persisted server-side. A missing or invalid key in strict mode (dvara.llm-gateway.data-plane.require-api-key=true) returns 401 invalid_api_key. See Data plane authentication for rotation and revoke flows.

X-Trace-ID​

Pass X-Trace-ID for distributed tracing correlation. DVARA resolves the trace ID in this order: (1) client-supplied X-Trace-ID / X-Trace-Id header, (2) the OTel trace ID from the current span when OpenTelemetry tracing is active, (3) a random UUID. The chosen value lands on the audit event, the SLF4J MDC, and is echoed back as the X-Trace-ID response header.

# Python (OpenAI SDK)
response = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="gpt-4o",
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Hello"}],
    extra_headers={"X-Trace-ID": "my-trace-123"},
)
// TypeScript (OpenAI SDK)
const response = await client.chat.completions.create(
  {
    model: "gpt-4o",
    messages: [{ role: "user", content: "Hello" }],
  },
  { headers: { "X-Trace-ID": "my-trace-123" } },
);
// Java (LangChain4j)
OpenAiChatModel model = OpenAiChatModel.builder()
        .baseUrl("http://localhost:8080/v1")
        .apiKey("your-dvara-api-key")
        .modelName("gpt-4o")
        .customHeaders(Map.of("X-Trace-ID", "my-trace-123"))
        .build();

The same trace ID will appear on:

  • The GATEWAY_REQUEST and GATEWAY_RESPONSE audit events
  • The X-Trace-ID response header DVARA sends back to you
  • The OTLP span emitted for the request (when tracing is enabled)

X-Session-Id​

Pass X-Session-Id for agent session tracking. DVARA groups requests sharing a session ID into a single agentic session, which activates loop detection, approval gates, and session-level audit grouping.

response = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="gpt-4o",
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Continue our conversation"}],
    extra_headers={"X-Session-Id": "agent-session-456"},
)
const response = await client.chat.completions.create(
  {
    model: "gpt-4o",
    messages: [{ role: "user", content: "Continue" }],
  },
  { headers: { "X-Session-Id": "agent-session-456" } },
);
OpenAiChatModel model = OpenAiChatModel.builder()
        .baseUrl("http://localhost:8080/v1")
        .apiKey("your-dvara-api-key")
        .modelName("gpt-4o")
        .customHeaders(Map.of("X-Session-Id", "agent-session-456"))
        .build();

Sessions appear in the DVARA Flightdeck under Agents → Sessions, where you can see loop-detection status, kill a runaway session, or drill into every request the session produced.

Response headers​

DVARA stamps response headers to signal in-band conditions that don't justify a non-2xx but a well-behaved client should react to. None of these break the OpenAI wire format; they layer on top.

HeaderWhen emittedWhat it means
X-Trace-IDAlwaysThe trace ID DVARA resolved for the request — echo it in your application logs to grep across the audit, tracing, and provider-log layers.
X-Gateway-Strict-Downgraded: trueresponse_format: json_schema with strict: true against Anthropic or AWS BedrockThe underlying provider cannot enforce strict JSON Schema. DVARA still issues the tool-use rewrite, but a non-conforming response will not be rejected upstream — validate on the client if strictness is load-bearing.
X-Gateway-Failover-Blocked: capability_mismatch503 failover_capability_mismatchThe primary provider failed and no fallback on the route supports the requested capability (e.g. all fallbacks are vision-blind for an image request). Add a capable fallback to the route or change the request.
X-License-WarningLicense is EXPIRING_SOON (≤30 days) or GRACE_PERIOD (expired, within 14-day grace)The gateway is still serving traffic but the operator should renew. Surface this to SRE alerting so it doesn't fall to a degraded state.
X-Budget-Warning, X-Budget-Utilization-PctSoft budget threshold crossedSpend has crossed the configured soft-limit-pct. The request still succeeds; the headers let dashboards and clients show "approaching budget" notices ahead of the eventual 402 budget_cap_hard.
X-Context-Window-Warning, X-Context-Window-UtilizationApproaching the model's context windowThe estimated input tokens are over the per-tenant guardrail.context.warning-threshold-pct (default 70%). At the hard threshold a 400 context_window_exceeded is returned.
Retry-After, X-RateLimit-Retry-After-Seconds, X-RateLimit-Reset, X-RateLimit-Remaining429 rate_limit_exceeded or 429 priority_throttledStandard rate-limit backoff envelope. Honor Retry-After (seconds) to avoid hammering the rate-limit window.

The HTTP error envelope ({"error": {"type": "...", "code": "...", "message": "...", ...}}) is documented separately in Error handling.

Why this matters for governance​

Trace IDs and session IDs are the join key between:

  1. Your application's structured logs
  2. Your tracing backend (Jaeger, Tempo, Honeycomb)
  3. DVARA's immutable audit trail
  4. The upstream provider's request logs (via propagation)

Without them, when a policy fires a denial at 3 a.m. you know what was blocked but not which customer request triggered it. With them, one grep on the trace ID reconnects every layer of the stack.

Next steps​

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